TECHNOLOGY: CONNECTIONS

The distinction between copies and originals is becoming meaningless on the Web.

By Edward Rothstein

Published: January 6, 1997

A FEW decades ago, when the Internet was barely a fantasy, a series of commercials reminded us of where we had come from and where we were going. Somewhere in our worn memory banks, we might even be able to retrieve images from those commercials, showing a grinning, rotund monk holding pages from an illuminated manuscript. ''Xerox has just come up with another miracle,'' one ad proclaimed. ''XL-10 copies aren't just positively beautiful. They're absolutely faithful.''

As the cultural historian Hillel Schwartz suggests in a strange and provocative new book, ''The Culture of the Copy'' (Zone Books, 1997), that faith was repaid. Xerox began to seem an heir to the religious communities that once copied manuscripts by hand, laboriously checking, stroke by stroke, the results of their efforts. But not even the testimony of the chubby monk could completely hide the fact that copying, which began in reverence, had ended in the commonplace. Copies have now become so familiar, Mr. Schwartz contends, that we are no longer certain about whether an original is even so important. We are, he suggests, obsessed with copies, whether we are thinking about twins, patents or Xerox machines.

But Mr. Schwartz, if anything, does not go far enough. His rambling, eccentric book is nearly encyclopedic, with its chronicle of the evolution of mimeographs, Speedographs and Gestetner machines, Polaroid Land Cameras and virtual reality war games, special repographic inks (made of ''Aleppo galls, gum arabic, green copperas and alum'') and infinitely replicable digital codes. But during the last five years, the copy has become even more dominant, through the influence of the Internet.

The Internet is a vast network of copies, held together by copying. The Internet has even erased differences between computers, allowing copies to be sent between once-incompatible machines. It is meaningless to talk about the ''original'' of a Web site, and no one would think of giving its underlying program code any priority as being more ''authentic'' or important than the infinitely reproducible result. Web utopians hail this as a liberation from property, priority and privilege: Any Web object can be duplicated anywhere without being cheapened, altered or controlled.

There is, though, an accompanying fear that this free flow of images and information will soon come to an end. A sobering lesson, after all, was taught in the case of digital audio tape. A few years ago, recording companies objected to the sale of this technology because it allowed perfect copies to be made of compact disks. Even when a special piracy code was introduced on the digital tapes to prevent reproduction, some companies still balked. As a result, the format was effectively quashed and is now used primarily by professionals in the recording industry.

The worry is that something similar could happen on the Web, as economic forces mobilize to control the copying that is the Web's main virtue, creating ''secure'' sites and ''encrypted'' texts. The Web market may depend on some such restrictions. But one value of the Web may also be not in receiving a unique or private object, but in receiving a reproducible and public one. If the Web lives up to economic expectations and does not collapse into libertarian chaos, it will partly be because of its replicative powers, not despite them. Each copy may even be unique, made to order, and composed of fragments of other copies, like some electronic newspapers now being constructed. The Web may turn into the shrine of the custom-made copy.

Some companies will also continue to allow copying while controlling access, creating a new, malleable form of property. This is already what William H. Gates did when his privately held digital media company, the Corbis Corporation, acquired the huge photographic resources of the Bettmann Archive in 1995. It seemed a quixotic action, an obsessive acquisition of images that in the past had been licensed, one at a time, for publication in magazines and newspapers.

But Mr. Gates's idea was that these images were supposed to be copied and distributed to every personal computer for a fee, becoming a form of interior decoration for some, allowing extensive photographic research for others. The images would be controlled with a digital ''watermark'' identifying their provenance and preventing their further replication. Something similar may eventually happen as digital libraries evolve: Getting a ''copy'' of a book will then have a new meaning.

We are already halfway there. The influence of the Net and the PC is just feeding a wider cultural preoccupation. As Mr. Schwartz notes, ours is a culture that has turned art reproductions into replacements for the works themselves and made sound sampling a preoccupation of recording artists. This is not something to be unambiguously celebrated. Something profound is lost in the apotheosis of the copy, for we tend to have less regard for what is replicated than for what is not. The monks studied the texts they copied; we barely have time to glance at our copies. A world constructed entirely of copies could lack a frame of reference.

Except, of course, for a subculture, dwelling deep in the technological land of copies. There are some who have devoted themselves to the solemn task of cracking the codes that underlie the world of the copy, trying to replicate what seems beyond replication, to open what seems sealed. These are the pirates and the hackers, the fetishists who, oddly enough, try to be as personally unpredictable and eccentric as their material is infinitely replicable. It may even be that in this strange universe, these cultists of the digital copy are the chubby monk's true heirs.